Over at The Corner, I linked to a USA Today story the other day about Americans elbowing illegals out of the way for day-labor jobs, under my headline of "And Yet, We Still Haven't Suspended Immigration." In response, one reader wrote, sarcastically, "Yah, because protectionism is clearly the answer for our economic woes." This betrayed a widespread misconception about immigration and trade, one that's important to keep in mind as the president unveils the political theater production called his Read more...

Rep. Lamar Smith, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and immigration-enforcement stalwart, wheedled updated statistics out of DHS and found that, in the words of the Washington Times story:

Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

As reader Paul G. suggests, the debate over militarizing the border is now over. From the AP:

MEXICO CITY – Business groups in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez said Wednesday they are calling for United Nations peacekeepers to quell the drug-related violence that has given their city one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

The immigration lawyers' association (among many others) claims credit for its presumed role in ushering Lou Dobbs off CNN. (I write about the broader campaign to silence amnesty critics over at National Review Online.) But what I found interesting about this particular posting (besides its comparison of Dobbs to Father Coughlin) was this:

He will clearly find another "Bully Pulpit," whether it is another media outlet willing to air his rants or a run for public office, perhaps financed by those who pour their money into FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a secret U.S. mission that recently extracted most of the remaining Jews from Yemen, where they're coming under increasing pressure from the local Arabs. This completes the work of Operation Magic Carpet, which brought the bulk of Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1949 and 1950. Read more...

After the 2007 amnesty failed in the Senate, the open borders crowd decided to forego policy debates and turn up to 11 their efforts to demonize their opponents. As part of that strategy, the Southern Poverty Law Center was assigned to designate FAIR a "hate group," La Raza started a "We Can Stop the Hate" campaign, and the new radical-left group America's Voice posted an online election for the "Top Anti-Immigrant Wolf" (vote for me!). Read more...

I feel like taking a shower after writing about the Southern Poverty Law Center, but for some reason it's taken seriously by the media and even government agencies, so I can't avoid it. A couple examples this week of how ludicrous the SPLC's charges of "hate" are. Read more...

When I wrote a few months ago about the origins of "la raza" as a racial-surpremacist concept (developed in the '20s and '30s on the idea of the biological superiority of mestizos), Janet Murguia, head of the National Council of La Raza, pointed and sputtered over at the Huffington Post. Read more...

The Obama administration has adopted a Clinton-era immigration enforcement tactic that is starting to bear fruit. As the NYT describes today, instead of factory raids, the feds are auditing the personnel records of hundreds of companies and the people with bogus documents are starting to be fired, 1,800 of them at one L.A. garment factory. Since Obama isn't going to allow raids, audits like this are better than nothing — a lot better, in fact. Read more...

I'm all for border fencing and the like; it's an essential tool of national sovereignty.

But for too many politicians, and even ordinary folks, support for border security is a cop out, a substitute for thinking about the overall immigration problem, only part of which has anything to do with our border with Mexico.

One vital issue that is neglected because of this tunnel-vision on border fences is visa overstays. The Dallas jihadist shows how important this is; I suspected he was an overstayer, and the Dallas Morning News confirmed: Read more...

The head of the Census Bureau said this week that trying to identify the illegal aliens in the upcoming census would not be practical. And he's right — it's not just that the forms have already been printed, but who's going to honestly answer that they're illegal? Read more...

There was an important vote on a minor procedural matter Wednesday on the floor of the House. Arizona's Rep. Raul Grijalva, a leftist open-borders guy (and I don't mean liberal — MEChA member, 100% rating from the ACLU, etc.) sponsored a bill to create new national-park area along the border. Read more...

The Economist's website is hosting a "debate" on the following proposition: "This house believes there is too much international migration." Arguing against the proposition is one Dr. Danny Sriskandarajah, Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, saying all the usual tranzi stuff. Read more...

Ann Corcoran over at Refugee Resettlement Watch points out that Refugees from Bhutan are the third-largest group of refugees resettled so far this year in the U.S. The perversity of this policy is clear when you learn that they're ethnic Nepalese kicked out by the Bhutanese government and living in refugee camps in — Nepal! Read more...

SELMA, Calif. — The combined punch of drought, water restrictions and recession has created an ironic situation in California's Central Valley: Officials are handing out tons of food in the heart of one of the nation's most productive agricultural regions. ...

Interesting thing…the White House dedicated a whole website to debunking healthcare myths. They must finally realize that their claims that illegal immigrants won't be covered are untrue…because I can't find a single word about illegal immigrants on their page.

Kathleen Parker's column today has a great paragraph that could apply to any number of policy areas:

"Comprehensive" may be the scariest word in the English language when it tumbles from the lips of a politician. Instead of trying to revamp every aspect of the *********** system, Congress should follow Mackey's lead and tackle a few fixable problems with consensus and support from Americans, who, though frustrated with the status quo, aren't quite ready to surrender self-determination.

In between Quebecois meals bathed in gravy, or meat pies, or meat pies bathed in gravy, I missed something from a story this week on Obama's latest signal that amnesty's not happening any time soon: Read more...

While reflecting on a recent Quebec meal of french fries bathed in cheese and gravy (who thought that up, anyway?), I read the Wall Street Journal piece linked in the web briefing about the harmful effects of counting illegal aliens in next year's decennial census for the purposes of congressional (and state legislative) apportionment. Read more...

The National Council of La Raza has just wrapped up its annual conference in Chicago. While I think Tom Tancredo was engaging in hyperbole when he described La Raza as "a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses" (that describes instead MEChA and the Brown Berets), there's more to the comparison than people might realize. Read more...

Jim Robb of Numbers USA has some fun with the notes (taken by a participant who grew a conscience) of a closed-door meeting of open-borders lobbyists. It was organized by amnesty czarina Tamar Jacoby, who's the source of the title of this post. None of it's all that surprising — rope-selling businessmen complaining that even in this econony they need more cheap labor. One thing that was notable was that right after lefty wonk Simon Rosenberg said "Passing CIR [amnesty and increased immigration] will help Democrats lock in the Hispanic vote," Grover Norquist chimed in to agree that we need amnesty and more immigration. Who's side is he on? Read more...

An op-ed in yesterday's Post is titled "Immigration Pitfall: Why 'Legalization Only' Won't Fly" and I thought to myself it'd be worth a look to see what pro-enforcement arguments might have made it into the paper. Then I saw the authors and figured out what was up. Read more...

There's a fair, even-handed profile in the Times today of Kris Kobach, the law professor who's taken the lead role in legal advocacy for local communities seeking to implement their own immigration-related ordinances. (See his CIS report). Read more...

Wednesday and Thursday saw Senate approval of four good immigration amendments to the Homeland Security appropriations bill — not silver bullets that will solve everything, but real steps in the right direction nonetheless. A measure sponsored by Sen. Jeff Sessions would permanently reauthorize E-Verify and require federal contractors to use it (the similar contractor rule hyped by the administration is much narrower and riddled with loopholes). This amendment had failed in March by a vote of 47–50, but passed this week 53–44, with eight Democrats switching from no to yes votes (and two switching the other way). Every single Republican voted for it. A measure to require completion of the border fencing passed 54–44, and two other amnedments passed by voice vote — i.e., unanimously: one requires implementation of the Social Security No-Match Rule (overturning the administration announcement Wednesday to rescind the rule), while the other would permit employers to screen their existing workforce with the E-Verify system, which now may be used only for new hires. Read more...

The administration has announced that it's abandoning an important immigration initative that would have identified large numbers of illegal immigrants in the workforce. To camouflage this capitulation, the same press release reiterates a promise to finally implement a different, much smaller initative. Read more...

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.